It doesn't take long to get through the story...once. Reynardo has many choices to make as he heads towards a confrontation with the Emperor. Inevitably, the fox falls in the final confrontation. At which point he wakes up, back at the beginning, but with the knowledge he gained in his earlier failure. Each failure teaches our hero one of four truths, and once he knows them all, he can navigate towards a successful ending.
The story is told largely through a narrator, who not only tells you what's happening along the way, but also comments on how you go about your business. It reminds me a lot of Bastion. For example, if you're destroying barrels and crates, expect some snarky remarks about how destructive you are. And of course he has something to say when you die.
Which happens a lot, at least if you're as bad at these kind of games as I am. The combat expects you to fight a bunch of enemies at once, reacting quickly to impending attacks with blocking and using special moves against specific enemies. My twitch-reaction is awful, and it doesn't help that attacking with Reynardo's sword locks you into an animation, so you can't move until it's done. Also, you can't do the special moves at all times...I'd hit the dash button to get away from an explosion, for instance, and Reynardo would just stand there and die even if I had the stamina necessary for the skill. I did OK through the early game, but around the time I found the second truth, battles became a real pain.
It doesn't help that it's very difficult to heal Reynardo. There's a health-stealing sword, but you can't use it much before running out of energy. Occasionally you can find health in the environment, but you have to waste time breaking crates and such. That takes forever due to the aforementioned attack animation lock...move to a crate, break it, wait for Reynardo to finish his follow-through, pick up loot, repeat. It's tedious enough that I gave up after the first couple of levels and just waded into battle without full health. Which means that I died even more, of course. Fortunately you revive at the start of the battle and can retry it as many times as needed, but each time you start at half health, not full. During the entire second half of the game, I don't think I ever had more than half health.
The game is also very slow to start up. I've got plenty of computing power that runs most games easily, but this one took several minutes to load and switch between areas. I assume that's a result of the cross-platform nature of the programming, since the game was released for both Windows and PS4. It's a minor thing, but annoying. Add to that the fact that there's no way to skip the narration at the start of each area, even if you've heard it several times before, and the wait time before actually playing gets pretty tedious.
I really liked the concept behind Stories: The Path of Destinies, with the different ways that Reynardo's story could unfold. If it wasn't such a pain to actually play the game, I'd probably have seen more of those different stories. As it is, one time through was enough.
